‘Against Wind and Tide’ – The Double Life of Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Charles Lindbergh comes down off the pedestal he occupied in his wife’s earlier books

Against Wind and Tide: Letters and Journals, 1947–1986. By Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Edited and with an introduction by Reeve Lindbergh. Pantheon, 358 pp., $27.95.

By Janice Harayda

Seven years ago a German division of Random House dimmed the halo of an American hero when it published The Double Life of Charles A. Lindbergh. Author Rudolf Schroeck reported that the aviator had fathered seven children by three European women while married to Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the daughter of a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico. Genetic testing confirmed some of his claims, and Reeve Lindbergh, the youngest child of Charles and Anne, later wrote of meeting her half-siblings in her memoir Forward From Here.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh also led double life, bisected by emotion rather than biology, in which a public serenity often hid a deep private anxiety. Nothing shows the gap between her inner and outer lives better than the sixth and final volume of her letters and journals, which contains material Lindbergh wrote between the ages of 41 and 79. She says in a diary entry made in 1955, nearly a quarter-century after the kidnapping and death of her infant son:

“I have become a kind of symbol – a Mother figure to the American public – because I married their Hero – is it? – or because I lost a child?”

Lindbergh added that she felt “gummed into a frame – Whistler’s Mother, complete with rocking chair and folded hands.” The near-perfection that Americans projected onto her belied a pain caused in part by her husband’s selfishness and long, frequent, and unexplained absences in the last decades of their life together.

In Against Wind and Tide Charles Lindbergh comes down off the pedestal he occupied in his wife’s earlier letters and diaries. He refuses to return from a trip when she has difficult knee surgery. He at first balks at attending his older daughter’s wedding because, his wife writes to the hurt bride-to-be, “your father never goes to ceremonies of any kind” (which can hardly have comforted her after he attended a White House dinner the previous year). And he leaves his wife alone for days in a primitive and isolated house they had built on Maui, an A-frame dwelling shared with rats. “They seem to eat everything – soap, curtains, plastic covers to the cookie jars, shoes, etc. – everything but poison,” she writes. “At night I am scared and read late and take a pill – but in the daytime I don’t mind much.” At least once Charles Lindbergh’s behavior prompted his wife to consider leaving her marriage.

Did Lindbergh know that her husband had affairs during his absences? If Reeve Lindbergh has the answer, she doesn’t say so in her introduction to Against Wind and Tide. Nor does she directly confirm that, as A. Scott Berg reported in Lindbergh, her mother had an extramarital affair with her doctor, Dana Atchley, to whom she wrote many letters included in Against Wind and Tide. With Clinton-esque sophistry, Reeve Lindbergh says that while she believes her mother had “love affairs,” they may have been “affairs more of words than caresses.”

That coyness doesn’t diminish the appeal of Against Wind and Tide. Lindbergh’s letters and diaries form a portrait of wise and loving woman’s lifelong efforts to reconcile her loyalty to her family with her need for independence and rewarding work, a theme she also developed in Gift From the Sea. Lindbergh had an exceptional gift for observing and reflecting on her experiences, whether she was attending a state dinner or walking “in the mild damp golden afternoon” near her home in Darien, Conn. She makes you see a famous image of Jacqueline Kennedy afresh when she writes of White House dinner: “Mrs. Kennedy swept in like a queen, looking extremely beautiful in a long pink stiff gown, hair high and stiff – rather Japanese – with a diamond star” set into it. And her hard-won perspectives on widowhood and growing old offer an implicit and refreshing challenge to pop-psychological banalities about what Americans euphemistically call “aging.” Lindbergh writes that spending part of the year in a different climate in later life, as many retirement experts recommend, “makes the other months seem rather more unbearable than they were before.” Clinging to an old neighborhood may not help, either: “One really needs a very different rhythm at our age, and it is difficult to reestablish it in the old place.”

Lindbergh died in 2001 at the age of 94 and, besides the posthumously published Against Wind and Tide, wrote 13 books while married to a man who might ask her to fly on a moment’s notice to the Philippines to meet Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. And many of the most perceptive comments in the new volume deal with her struggle to maintain a literary career in such unpredictable circumstances. She writes to a friend whose work on a book appears to have stalled: “Remember that big creative act of taking hold of your life freshly and adventurously, as you have just done, takes up much of the creative energy you have. It cannot help but use it up.” No small part of the appeal of this book is that for all her sorrows, Lindbergh kept trying to confront life “freshly and adventurously.”

Best line:No. 1: “I cannot see what I have gone through until I write it down. I am blind without a pencil.” No. 2: “I am convinced that you must write as if no one were ever going to see it. Write it all, as personally and specifically as you can, as deeply and honestly as you can. … In fact, I think it is the only true way to reach the universal, through the knot-hole of the personal. So do, do go ahead and write it as it boils up: the hot lava from the unconscious. Don’t stop to observe, criticize, or be ‘ironic.’ Just write it, like a letter, without rereading. Later, one can decide what to do.”

Worst line: From Reeve Lindbergh’s introduction: “I was certainly amazed to learn, a few years after my mother’s death, that my father had several relationships with other women during his travels in the 1950s and 1960s, and that there were children from these relationships. However, it did not surprise me at all to learn from these children, when I met them, that the paternal pattern was the same for them …” “There were children”? How many? Lindbergh may have dealt with this in her Forward From Here, but she’s leaving readers of Against Wind and Tide in the dark.

The older I get, the more the old 1957 Jimmy Stewart movie “The Spirit of St. Louis” becomes a larger and larger fiction. Losing one’s innocence that Charles was pretty much like Jimmy in and out of that movie has been tough for many of us–and for Anne as well.

[…] ‘Against Wind and Tide’ – The Double Life of Anne Morrow Lindbergh September 4, 2012 By Thomas in Books Tags: books, memoir Leave a comment Best line: No. 1: ”I cannot see what I have gone through until I write it down. I am blind without a pencil.” No. 2: “I am convinced that you must write as if no one were ever going to see it. Write it all, as personally and specifically as you can, as deeply and honestly as you can. … In fact, I think it is the only true way to reach the universal, through the knot-hole of the personal. So do, do go ahead and write it as it boils up: the hot lava from the unconscious. Don’t stop to observe, criticize, or be ‘ironic.’ Just write it, like a letter, without rereading. Later, one can decide what to do.” […]

I just recently read this book, and really liked it. As a longtime fan of Gift From the Sea, I found it fascinating to read about it from her private perspective as the author (especially the part where she talks about having outgrown it). It’s sobering to realize that an educated, affluent and gifted woman such as AML lived a life that was subjected, in so many ways, to the often unreasonable demands of her husband.

Thanks, Julia. I, too, found it fascinating to see what she had to endure and how much she believed she had to hide from the public. “Against Wind and Tide” shows a side of AML that is both consistent with and very different from that which you see in her earlier books.